Leave Your Mistakes In

Any creative endeavor is highly non-linear, but the sharing of it almost always skips a lot of the actual work that goes into it. That’s ok; a clear progression makes for a good story that’s easy to tell. But don’t judge your reality against someone else’s compressed work. It’s ok if it takes you a day to make a cutting board like one that someone made in six minutes on YouTube; the truth is it probably took them a day too.

This is why we leave our mistakes in our tutorials. Editing out the boring but necessary parts during a tutorial can sometimes help get to the point faster, but it can also easily confuse and frustrate beginners that may not know how you got from point A to point B.

More importantly, when you edit mistakes out, you simultaniously edit the humanity out. By cutting out your mistakes and hiccups, or doing another take until you get it perfect, you may be unknowingly setting a tone of “I don’t make mistakes. I am perfect.”, or at the least “I am a perfect robot”. Hardly a tone you want when you are trying to transfer knowledge to someone that will inevitably make a mistake and wonder if they are doing it right.

Leave your mistakes in when teaching others. You may think it’s embarrassing, but it’s not. Humility is empowering to those you are trying to teach.

Although it really extends the duration of the videos. I will rarely watch a tutorial any more (unless I am looking for a specific technique) because they are too time consuming. If you could add in timeline markers (or descriptions)…. that would be amazing.